


What Does the Sky Reply?

by scioscribe



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Stormtrooper Culture, Stormtrooper Rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22234570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Finn shook his head.  “I feel like this is what’s supposed to be next.  Go out, find the people like us that the First Order tore up like weeds, see what there is to salvage once they know they don’t have to fight anymore.  I just don’t have a stake in it the way you do.  I mean, you had friends—your whole company was standing right there alongside you, refusing to fire.  Everybody I love—nobody was in my life that way before the Resistance, you know, before Poe and Rey.”
Relationships: Finn & Jannah (Star Wars)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 59
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	What Does the Sky Reply?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NotebookishType](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotebookishType/gifts).



> Title from Karl Shapiro's "Travelogue for Exiles."

“You sure you want to do this?” Finn said.

Jannah tightened the sling holding her bow snugly against her shoulder. “You asked me that already.”

“That’s because it seems like there’d be a lot of reasons for somebody to not want to do this.”

“Well, I do. Just like you.”

He laughed. “You think _I_ want to do this?”

She’d been expecting him to think along different patterns than the rest of the Resistance, who had no concept of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points, who were constantly doing things that they didn’t care about doing and that no one had even _told_ them to do, but he must have been with them long enough to get weird. Or they were handing down orders already and he’d gotten the shaft as much as any of them. But he was high up in the Resistance, wasn’t he?

“If you don’t want to do it,” she said, “I can go by myself.”

Finn shook his head. “I feel like this is what’s supposed to be next. Go out, find the people like us that the First Order tore up like weeds, see what there is to salvage once they know they don’t have to fight anymore. I just don’t have a stake in it the way you do. I mean, you had friends—your whole company was standing right there alongside you, refusing to fire. Everybody I love—nobody was in my life that way before the Resistance, you know, before Poe and Rey.”

“Didn’t you have a squad?” Jannah said.

“For about ten minutes. I did grunt work all over Starkiller—you want something polished, I know the right solvent to get it so squeaky-clean you can see your reflection. That kind of scrubbing, mostly you work alone. I didn’t fight, not until the day I left.”

The First Order had probably thought he was the perfect, precision-made Stormtrooper, right up until he stole their prisoner out from underneath their noses. What he was saying was exactly what the First Order had wanted them to feel, Jannah knew: all loneliness and no loyalty, one body in your cohort interchangeable with any other. If you spent much time on the ground, off Starkiller, you got compromised; out in the field, they didn’t swap you around so much. Everybody she’d revolted with, she’d been sleeping elbow-to-elbow with for weeks, mud leaking through the hard shell of their uniforms, somebody else’s sour breath in her face. Your mates gave you a name, one that’d slip under the brass’s attention: TZ-1719 to Teazy.

FN-2187 to Finn. She’d always figured he’d gotten that from his corp-mates and just kept it, the way she’d kept Teazy for a while before _Jannah_ had bobbed to the surface of her mind and felt right.

“Then the rest of us were just a blur to you, really,” Jannah said. “Masks.”

“I knew there were people under there. I just didn’t know they felt the same things I did. The person I really knew best, before I met my friends? Phasma.”

“Well, that’s depressing.”

“Right?”

Jannah studied him. “You’re worried you’ll meet other Stormtroopers and they won’t surprise you at all. That they’ll just be Phasma all over again instead of being like me.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Right now you’ve got to admit I’ve been pretty lucky, acquaintance-wise. I’m good at running into the right people. I just don’t want to be disappointed.”

“You won’t be,” Jannah said, a little recklessly.

That got her a full smile; he had a nice one, one she was sorry had been hidden behind plastoid for so long. “Hey, if you’re that sure, then what are we waiting for? Let’s get out there.”

They got out there.

Lando had loaned her the _Falcon_ , which Finn seemed sort of genially pissed off about—“Rey and Poe and I flew this piece of junk back and forth across the galaxy so many times that the damn hyperspace drive almost fell out of it, but General Calrissian swoops in it right at the end of the war and suddenly it’s his? Chewie handed over part-time ownership just like _that_. I know they’re old friends, but come on”—and he’d done it to let her find her people.

“What if my people are all ex-First Order Stormtroopers?”

“As long as they’re _ex_ ,” Lando had said, with a warm chuckle, “we’ll take anybody. Trust me, the _Falcon_ has carried people a hell of a lot more disreputable than anybody you’d like to know. And family’s all in how you look at it, right, Chewie?”

Chewbacca had roared what Jannah had figured was probably agreement.

So they had their transport, complete with plenty of room to hold refugees and turncoats and rebels, and they had an idea of where to go—the trouble was that the idea was _anywhere_. The whole point of the First Order had been it sinking its claws into everything. Anywhere they went was bound to have ex-troopers. They could look at the star-chart and point.

“I’m not sure where to try first,” Jannah said, looking at their myriad options. “I shared a sleeping pod once with somebody who might have wound up on Bergon—”

“Dyamar III,” Finn said, pointing at one of the biggest flecks of blue on the screen. “That’s still got a big First Order stronghold.”

“And you want to start with a challenge? Walk in and give the peace talk to fighters who still have generals breathing down their necks?”

“I want to start where us stepping in will do the most good.”

Jannah sat back in her chair, the thick padding of it cradling her; it was more comfortable than any TIE fighter ever was, that was for sure. He really did think like the Resistance more than he thought like her. He wanted to do good, not just carve out a peaceful niche for himself.

She’d been more a part of the job than he had; she’d liked it more, so she’d let it make her dirtier. She’d killed in the name of the First Order. Not civilians—not knowingly—but she’d left her share of bodies behind. She still saw their ranks as something to rescue people from.

With Finn around, she had to reconfigure that. She had to say that she’d go out and look for battles where she might have to kill one or two of her own, if they wouldn’t listen to her; she had to agree that his kind of people were more worth saving than hers. She had to put more value on innocence. In the heat of the moment, she would feel the sad, sorry truth of it, that she couldn’t save everyone, but right now, cold-blooded, all she could think was that she could have been on Dyamar III herself.

But something had to be done, he was right about that. They couldn’t let tyranny and violence drag on just because the people doing the grunt-work of it had maybe shared a canteen with her once.

At least if she and Finn were there, on Dyamar, they’d have a chance of seeing the churn of First Order troops as something human, something salvageable.

“You don’t like it,” Finn said.

“We don’t think about it the same way, that’s all.”

“How do you think about it?”

She exhaled. “Like surviving,” she said bluntly. “One minute to the next, me and mine. Like a war.”

“War’s over.”

“Tell that to the people still fighting it.”

“That’s fair. It’s over enough, I guess, that we’re supposed to be… governing. Protecting what we love.” His expression softened. “That’s what you’re trying to do, though, isn’t it?”

He squeezed her shoulder, hard, and it was one of the first recognizable Stormtrooper gestures she’d seen in him: the knockaround touch that you had to make solid enough, hard enough, to be felt through the plastoid. Without their armor on, they all always forgot to account for that. They were always leaving bruises.

Jannah’s eyes burned. He wasn’t just a hero, then, some untouchable inspiration. He was a friend after all.

“We’ll try to do everything,” Finn said. “Your thing, my thing, Poe’s thing. Everybody’s thing.”

“That’s a lot of things.”

“We’re valiant,” Finn said.

“We’re out of her minds,” Jannah said.

“Yep. Welcome to the Newer Republic.”

They couldn’t really be calling it that.

***

Right away, Jannah could see why the First Order had done all it could to hold onto Dyamar III, no matter how much the Resistance chipped away at them, no matter how often local unrest boiled over: it was a world so rich that the soil was spotted indigo and carmine with mineral deposits that no one had even mined yet. This one planet had resources enough that somebody could fund and mount an empire from it for decades before they scorched it down to nothing.

And the capital was packed to the gills with Stormtroopers. No surprise there—they’d been able to land undetected _because_ of all those minerals; they messed up all the usual sensors. Anybody would be paranoid enough to overdo it on the security if they couldn’t control the traffic.

She was still better at understanding the First Order than she was the Resistance, but maybe that would change in time.

Finn was the more recognizable of the two of them—Jannah had seen an actual doll of him in marketplace once, even—so he’d wrapped a Irrian veil all his face. It was still a softer, more permeable mask than the trooper one, though; Jannah could still make out, up close, that he was sweating through it. It was so hot she was surprised the water wasn’t boiling in the fountains.

“Here’s a reason you could give them for an uprising,” Finn said through the thick swaddling of cloth. “If they turned on the First Order, they wouldn’t have to cook themselves out here anymore.”

“There you go. Hop up on the statue over there and yell that to everyone.”

“I’m not much of a public speaker.”

It _was_ strange to think that if she hadn’t dropped her weapon that day, she could have been roasting out here herself. No matter how weird the Resistance got, it didn’t demand that they all lock themselves in poorly ventilated armor that wasn’t even blaster-proof.

The helmets weren’t for their protection. They were just there so that ninety percent of the time, they couldn’t see each other.

“I’m not much of a public speaker either,” Jannah said, “but I’m going to try. Cover me?” She clambered up onto the flat steel block at the foot of the statue and looked down and out at the crowd.

She didn’t know what to say. At least nobody was looking at her yet. She closed her eyes.

She remembered growing up in Combat Training, where the bunks were honeycombed into the walls and they’d all slept almost stacked on top of each other, so close that they could reach up or down and grab hold of someone else’s hand. The older you were, the higher your bunk, so you had to climb up further every year, hopping and stretching from bunk to bunk because there weren’t any ladders. Sometimes kids had fallen, and most of them hadn’t been able to get back up again. You didn’t have to be too old before it was a long, long way to fall.

She’d always had to braid her hair in close to her skull or risk their inspector deciding it all needed to be buzzed off completely. Her friends had helped her: the code they all held in common with each other, sworn through cross-hatched blood oaths, was that they’d always help where they could, unless helping would get them killed. It was understood that they were all trying to stay alive.

Sometimes they’d stolen vid chips and players and watched them, crammed three or four in a bunk, staring transfixed at lives they’d never have. They’d mimicked the vids, asking each other pointless questions—“How’s your day going so far?” they’d say when they ran into each other on the battlefield. “Do you think our team is going to win the championship this year?”

And they’d killed. She’d killed.

Killed for the wrong side. Killed the people who believed in doing acts of pointless, risky goodness.

She raised her voice.

“I used to be a Stormtrooper,” she said, and the crowd hushed and turned to her. “You have options. You’ve got choices, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Put your blasters down. Walk out. If you have to kill somebody, kill the people who insist that you have to risk your life—risk your soul—to spill someone else’s blood on someone else’s world. None of you are even _from_ here. They wouldn’t let you stay if you had been. The First Order made us all exiles, but the Resistance can give you a home. It can give you hope.”

A guard marched towards her, weapon drawn, and Finn fired two swift shots into the ground, right in front of the guard's toes. “Let her talk.”

“I know what it’s like,” Jannah said. “I know all the things you could have done. Walk away from them.”

Finn hoisted himself up on the block beside her. He took off his veil. “Walk to _us_ ,” he said. “I was a Stormtrooper too.” He reached for her with his free hand and laced their fingers together. Bare skin against bare skin—something she’d felt so rarely in her life that it still gave her a little shock. Only the people closest to you were around when you were unarmored. There wasn’t any greater trust than that.

She squeezed his hand back, her fingers curling tightly in with his. She’d been right to tell Lando she already knew where to find her people.

Finn’s eyes were wet and shining, and at first she didn’t know why; she was looking at him and not the crowd.

But then she turned her head and saw helmet after helmet coming off. People standing there bare-faced, flushed, sweating, scared, guilty, angry, hopeful.

Not all the troopers. But more than she’d ever dared to hope in a place like this.

“Look,” she whispered.

Finn nodded. “I’m looking.” His voice sounded rusty. “Seems like I’m still lucky.”

There was a huge percussive thud then, repeated in rapid succession: ka- _thum_ , ka- _thum_ , ka- _thum_. Dust and smoke flew everywhere, sprays of color filling the air from the now vaporized minerals as the warm-up shots hit nothing but rock. They'd have better calibration in a minute or two; they'd be able to aim for the crowd. In the meantime, they were settling for terror, apparently: the First Order would rather destroy the wealth of Dyamar than see its soldiers go free.

Well, too bad for them. She lowered her goggles over her eyes. “How’s that sonic cannon fit in with your luck?”

“Typical. Really, really typical.”

Jannah smiled. Her cheeks were hurting. “Good. You know how to deal with it, then.”

“I do.” He started motioning their people forward. “Come on, everybody. First lesson in not working for the First Order: sometimes there’s a hell of a lot of running. But you’ve always got somewhere to go.” He was pointing at the hollow that had hid the _Falcon_ , but past that was the horizon, blue-violet and unmarked, and Jannah thought that plenty of their people would head straight for that, no questions asked, even if they didn’t know they’d trip and fall on their deliverance before they got to that open, empty sky.


End file.
